usquebaugh (spelled variously) is the earliest English rendering of the Irish term uisce beatha and Scottish Gaelic
Until the early 1700s, usquebaugh was usually encountered, at least beyond the Scottish Highlands or the Irish countryside, in the form of a malt spirit that had been turned into a cordial (and had the rawness of the spirit masked) by flavoring with licorice and nutmeg and a combination of other spices (e.g., cinnamon, cloves, caraway seeds, and ginger), and sweetening with raisins, dates, and cane sugar. The Irish version was particularly prized—“It cannot be made anywhere [else] in that perfection,” the English writer James Howell noted in 1634—and was exported not only to England but to the European continent as well.
On the continent, usquebaugh took on a life of its own, its formula—with brandy replacing the malt spirit, a good-sized dose of saffron for color, and a great latitude among the spices—having been absorbed into the floating corpus of recipes from which distiller-liquorists drew the products with which they stocked their shelves. This “escubac,” as the French called it, finally fell out of favor in the mid-nineteenth century. In the United Kingdom, the compound usquebaugh had begun to yield to the (greatly improved) unflavored product in the 1730s and was seldom seen after 1800, although the name lived on as a folkloric synonym for “whisky.”
See also cordials.
Company of Distillers of London. The Distiller of London. London: 1639.
Déjean [perh. Antoine Hornot]. Traité raisonné de la distillation, 4th ed. Paris: 1778.
Howell, James. Familiar Letters, or Epistolae ho-elianae, vol. 2. London: Dent, 1903.
By: David Wondrich